Global Warming Will Not Go Away

Devin Rogers
The global warming issue will not go away. Evidence continues to mount that some type of warming is occurring, maybe temporarily or of longer duration. But, is it caused by man and can anything be done about it? Environmental activism to reduce carbon dioxide emissions has reached a new intensity. The U.S. Supreme Court is being asked to rule on a suit which demands that the Environmental Protection Agency regulate the release of carbon dioxide as part of its air pollution responsibility. The president is being heavily lobbied to subscribe to the Kyoto Protocol which would require the U.S. to emit less carbon dioxide than it released in 1990. A book and a movie with the titles, An Inconvenient Truth, which press the case for global warming were released during 2006 by Al Gore, former vice president of the United States. He makes the case that man's actions in burning fossil fuels are projected to increase the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to the highest levels in history. He insists that uncontrolled releases of carbon dioxide will eventually melt the polar caps completely, raising sea level and inundating many coastal communities like New York, Miami, New Orleans, and Los Angeles; and drastically changing agricultural patterns because of redistribution of temperature and precipitation. And finally, on February 2, 2007, the Fourth IPCC Assessment Report on global warming was released. Interestingly, the report reduced the alarmist rhetoric because climate modelers found that they had overestimated the rise in global temperature and observations did not support the predictions. For many years I have been a skeptic of global warming because the climate record available to assess the effects of increased carbon dioxide emission has been too short to say with confidence that the effect is real. There is no question that the concentration of carbon dioxide has been increasing exponentially for almost 50 years now. it is still unclear if the conclusions are valid that this increase in carbon dioxide is due to man's burning of fossil fuels and that it is causing the apparent recent warming trend which is melting the polar caps. Several questions continue to nag researchers in the climate community. Is the globe really warming? Are the polar caps really melting? How much of the increase in carbon dioxide is due to man's influence? If man were to attempt to reduce carbon dioxide emissions would it actually do any good? And finally, are there any other possible explanations for the apparent global warming? These are not simple questions and it will require a much longer period of record to be confident in any conclusions. In order to answer the first two questions, massive amounts of global data must be averaged over a relatively long period of time. And because the effects of global warming are so small compared to the global average, great care must be taken to avoid bias in collection and analysis of the data. Many pitfalls in this process have already occurred which have produced a lack of confidence in the results.